You Will Never Sleep Alone
by mosylu
Summary: Cassian takes the opportunity to catch some sleep on the way to Scarif. So does Jyn. There's cuddling . . . sort of.


I SAW ROGUE ONE AND I HAVE REBELCAPTAIN FEELS AND YOU ALL ARE GONNA SHUT UP AND READ THEM.

Title is from Phillip Phillips' "Gone Gone Gone" because I'm a fool like that. Please excuse galactic distance inaccuracies because snuggly Rebelcaptain, that's why.

* * *

The twice-stolen shuttle really wasn't made for sleeping. But it was six hours of hyperspace to Scarif, and the craft was stuffed full of spies and assassins and the kind of people who knew how to catch even twenty minutes of downtime whenever it was offered. Five hours with extra time for mission logistics was a week's worth of sleep, and who knew but that they'd need it.

From the ladder to the cockpit, Bodhi looked at them all in amazement. He was practically vibrating with nerves, obviously nowhere near sleep as he climbed back up to his seat. Cargo pilot, Cassian reminded himself. He flew his route, he clocked his time, and he went to his bunk. Nothing like the dregs of the Rebellion, the hard and grimy soldiers with blood on their hands, that Cassian had scraped up to come along with him, like a herd of particularly deadly ducklings following Jyn Erso.

Who was asleep in a corner formed by the bench and the bulkhead. Apparently, she had learned that too, somewhere.

He wondered about that. Had it been as a teen fanatic under Saw Gerrera? As a criminal? As a child in hiding from the Empire?

It didn't matter, he told himself, and stood with his head on one side, studying the two or three square feet of bench, all the contiguous flat area there was left in the whole karking shuttle. There were even sleepers stretched out on the floor.

There was, however, that bubble of space around Jyn as she slept, legs folded to her chest, chin tucked to her knees, hands fisted in the hollow of her throat. Even her ankles and feet were woven around each other.

She was the only person he'd ever seen actually knot themselves into sleep. If she locked herself any tighter, she'd become a black hole.

(Like she hadn't already.)

(Like she hadn't sucked them all into this death trap of a mission without even asking.)

(Like her event horizon wasn't somewhere back on Yavin IV, when she'd taken his own sarcastic, self-mocking words and spoken them with such fervor that he'd remembered what it was like to believe them.)

He shook his head. Anyone who touched her was liable to get a boot to the throat or a fist to the crotch. Which would probably make the men, women, and nonbinaries aboard this shuttle respect her even more, but wouldn't make Scarif any easier.

He considered sleeping in the cockpit's footwell, but K2 would probably kick him all the way to Scarif just for the hell of it. He sighed and muttered, "move" to a dozing man, whose last mission had been to destabilize a strategically important outer rim planet by dispatching an entire royal family right down to the flop-eared pets.

 _"Move,"_ Cassian said again.

The assassin budged up a couple of inches.

Cassian wedged himself in between him and Jyn. He found a place to rest his boots, on the back of a woman stretched out on the floor, who didn't so much as twitch, and settled his head back against the bulkhead.

He tried but was unable to leave any clearance between himself and Jyn's body, humming with tension even as she slept. Well, fine. Maybe she wouldn't throat-punch him when she woke up. Possibly he was fast enough to block her, or at least to dodge.

He shut his eyes and willed himself to sleep. Just as it crawled up around him, he could have sworn he felt the line of her body soften against his. A little.

Five hours later, he clicked into wakefulness like a switch flipping. Out of long habit, he left his eyes closed and assessed.

Rustles and shuffles and grumbles of people waking. A low murmur with Imwe's particular cadence, a muttered curse from Malbus, who'd presumably been waking up to Imwe's obnoxious calm for years and felt the need to counterbalance it. The engines still had that particular hyperspace whine, so they hadn't dropped out yet. Good. Excellent.

As for him, he had a warm weight over his leg, up along his side and part of his front, and a hard little skull tucked under his chin.

He opened his eyes and saw he had a lap full of Jyn Erso.

She hadn't done anything so soft as cuddling against him, like a satiated lover. Instead, one arm was locked around his neck, the other hand fisted in his shirt. She'd shoved her shoulder under his arm, and in his sleep, he'd wrapped it around her back to hold her firm against him. She'd also hooked her leg over his thigh, digging her booted foot down between his calves and weaving it around his leg to hold him in place. His other hand was burrowed in the fold behind her knee.

The only way they were going to disentangle was if both of them let go.

He didn't linger on that thought.

"Jyn," he said, and she woke the way he had, her eyes flicking open. She rolled her head back until it rested on his shoulder and looked up at him, and he looked back at her. Her mouth was soft, one delicately flushed cheek bisected with a red imprint from the seam of his shirt, and her eyes were as sharp as razors.

He wondered if (as he was) she was mentally totaling up the number of eyes here in this shuttle to see them knotted together.

She pressed her lips together briefly, then opened her hand and let his shirt go. He started reclaiming his own various limbs from her. They sorted themselves out in silence.

Maybe it was the unspeakable luxury of five hours all in a row, but Cassian couldn't shake the feeling that his nap on the bench, wrapped up in Jyn Erso, was the best he'd slept in months. Years, maybe.

If they both got off Scarif, he might have to spend some time working out why.

FINIS


End file.
